External Advisory Panel

Among the responsibilities of the EAP, foremost is safeguarding the interests and confidentiality of study participants, and ensuring their data use limitations are respected.

The EAP is asked to make recommendations, as appropriate, to the NHLBI about:

• Strategies to bring together genomic and other omic characterizations in large numbers of subjects to drive biological insights;
• Methods to integrate omic data which may provide a multi-dimensional biological view of the disease pathogenesis;
• Other extant NIH or public resources that could be integrated or leveraged to extend the value or power of the TOPMed study;
• The design and choice of follow up functional studies to elucidate important observations from association analysis;
• Strategic partnerships to realize advances toward the goals of precision medicine;
• ELSI issues such as return of results to study subjects from this research effort;
• Provide feedback on gaps and / or weaknesses in current program strategies.